Towards nonideal iris recognition based on level set method, genetic algorithms and adaptive asymmetrical SVMs

We present algorithms for iris segmentation, feature extraction and selection, and iris pattern matching. To segment the inner boundary from a nonideal iris image, we apply a level set based curve evolution approach using the edge stopping function, and to detect the outer boundary, we employ the curve evolution approach using the regularized Mumford-Shah segmentation model with an energy minimization algorithm. Daubechies wavelet transform (DBWT) is used to extract the textural features, and genetic algorithms (GAs) are deployed to select the subset of informative features by combining the valuable outcomes from the multiple feature selection criteria without compromising the recognition accuracy. To speed up the matching process and to control the misclassification error, we apply a combined approach called the adaptive asymmetrical support vector machines (AASVMs). The parameter values of SVMs are also optimized in order to improve the overall generalization performance. The verification and identification performance of the proposed scheme is validated using the UBIRIS Version 2, the ICE 2005, and the WVU datasets.     

Real-time image restoration for iris recognition systems.

In the field of biometrics, it has been reported that iris recognition techniques have shown high levels of accuracy because unique patterns of the human iris, which has very many degrees of freedom, are used. However, because conventional iris cameras have small depth-of-field (DOF) areas, input iris images can easily be blurred, which can lead to lower recognition performance, since iris patterns are transformed by the blurring caused by optical defocusing. To overcome these problems, an autofocusing camera can be used. However, this inevitably increases the cost, size, and complexity of the system. Therefore, we propose a new real-time iris image-restoration method, which can increase the camera's DOF without requiring any additional hardware. This paper presents five novelties as compared to previous works: 1) by excluding eyelash and eyelid regions, it is possible to obtain more accurate focus scores from input iris images; 2) the parameter of the point spread function (PSF) can be estimated in terms of camera optics and measured focus scores; therefore, parameter estimation is more accurate than it has been in previous research; 3) because the PSF parameter can be obtained by using a predetermined equation, iris image restoration can be done in real-time; 4) by using a constrained least square (CLS) restoration filter that considers noise, performance can be greatly enhanced; and 5) restoration accuracy can also be enhanced by estimating the weight value of the noise-regularization term of the CLS filter according to the amount of image blurring. Experimental results showed that iris recognition errors when using the proposed restoration method were greatly reduced as compared to those results achieved without restoration or those achieved using previous iris-restoration methods.     

A new multi-unit iris authentication based on quality assessment and score level fusion for mobile phones

Although iris recognition technology has been reported to be more stable and reliable than other biometric systems, performance can be degraded due to many factors such as small eyes, camera defocusing, eyelash occlusions and specular reflections on the surface of glasses. In this paper, we propose a new multi-unit iris authentication method that uses score level fusion based on a support vector machine (SVM) and a quality assessment method for mobile phones. Compared to previous research, this paper presents the following two contributions. First, we reduced the false rejection rate and improved iris recognition accuracy by using iris quality assessment. Second, if even two iris images were determined to be of bad quality, we captured the iris images again without using a recognition process. If only one iris image among the left and right irises was regarded as a good one, it was used for recognition. However, if both the left and right iris images were good, we performed multi-unit iris recognition using score level fusion based on a SVM. Experimental results showed that the accuracy of the proposed method was superior to previous methods that used only one good iris image or those methods that used conventional fusion methods.     

A novel portable iris recognition system and usability evaluation

We propose a new portable iris recognition system. Because existing portable iris systems use customized embedded processing units, they are limited in ability to expand to other applications, and they have low processing power. To overcome such problems, we propose a new portable iris recognition system consisting of a conventional ultra-mobile personal computer (UMPC), a small universal serial bus (USB) iris camera, and near-infrared (NIR) light illuminators. In general, portable iris systems produce considerable optical blurring. Although auto-focusing motor-driven lenses can be used to overcome it, they are too bulky to be used in a small-sized portable iris system. Therefore, we adopt an iris image restoration algorithm which performs at real-time speed. And by using a conventional UMPC as a processing unit, our portable iris system is more extensible than previous systems. In general, the performance of iris recognition has been mainly evaluated based on the quantitative metrics such as EER (Equal Error Rate), ROC (Receiver Operational Characteristics) curve or recognition time. We propose a new performance measuring method based on qualitative metrics. That is usability evaluation including user acceptance, convenience, satisfaction and resistance.     

Periocular-based biometrics robust to eye rotation based on polar coordinates

Conventional iris recognition requires a high-resolution camera equipped with a zoom lens and a near-infrared illuminator to observe iris patterns. Moreover, with a zoom lens, the viewing angle is small, restricting the user’s head movement. To address these limitations, periocular recognition has recently been studied as biometrics. Because the larger surrounding area of the eye is used instead of iris region, the camera having the high-resolution sensor and zoom lens is not necessary for the periocular recognition. In addition, the image of user’s eye can be captured by using the camera having wide viewing angle, which reduces the constraints to the head movement of user’s head during the image acquisition. Previous periocular recognition methods extract features in Cartesian coordinates sensitive to the rotation (roll) of the eye region caused by in-plane rotation of the head, degrading the matching accuracy. Thus, we propose a novel periocular recognition method that is robust to eye rotation (roll) based on polar coordinates. Experimental results with open database of CASIA-Iris-Distance database (CASIA-IrisV4) show that the proposed method outperformed the others.     

Improving Iris Recognition Performance Using Segmentation, Quality Enhancement, Match Score Fusion, and Indexing

This paper proposes algorithms for iris segmentation, quality enhancement, match score fusion, and indexing to improve both the accuracy and the speed of iris recognition. A curve evolution approach is proposed to effectively segment a nonideal iris image using the modified Mumford–Shah functional. Different enhancement algorithms are concurrently applied on the segmented iris image to produce multiple enhanced versions of the iris image. A support-vector-machine-based learning algorithm selects locally enhanced regions from each globally enhanced image and combines these good-quality regions to create a single high-quality iris image. Two distinct features are extracted from the high-quality iris image. The global textural feature is extracted using the 1-D log polar Gabor transform, and the local topological feature is extracted using Euler numbers. An intelligent fusion algorithm combines the textural and topological matching scores to further improve the iris recognition performance and reduce the false rejection rate, whereas an indexing algorithm enables fast and accurate iris identification. The verification and identification performance of the proposed algorithms is validated and compared with other algorithms using the CASIA Version 3, ICE 2005, and UBIRIS iris databases.      

Identifying Noncooperative Subjects at a Distance Using Face Images and Inferred Three-Dimensional Face Models

We present an approach to identify noncooperative individuals at a distance from a sequence of images, using 3-D face models. Most biometric features (such as fingerprints, hand shape, iris, or retinal scans) require cooperative subjects in close proximity to the biometric system. We process images acquired with an ultrahigh-resolution video camera, infer the location of the subjects' head, use this information to crop the region of interest, build a 3-D face model, and use this 3-D model to perform biometric identification. To build the 3-D model, we use an image sequence, as natural head and body motion provides enough viewpoint variation to perform stereomotion for 3-D face reconstruction. We have conducted experiments on a 2-D and 3-D databases collected in our laboratory. First, we found that metric 3-D face models can be used for recognition by using simple scaling method even though there is no exact scale in the 3-D reconstruction. Second, experiments using a commercial 3-D matching engine suggest the feasibility of the proposed approach for recognition against 3-D galleries at a distance (3, 6, and 9 m). Moreover, we show initial 3-D face modeling results on various factors including head motion, outdoor lighting conditions, and glasses. The evaluation results suggest that video data alone, at a distance of 3 to 9 meters, can provide a 3-D face shape that supports successful face recognition. The performance of 3-D–3-D recognition with the currently generated models does not quite match that of 2-D–2-D. We attribute this to the quality of the inferred models, and this suggests a clear path for future research.      

Multi-feature hierarchical topic models for human behavior recognition

Human behavior recognition is one important task of image processing and surveillance system. One main challenge of human behavior recognition is how to effectively model behaviors on condition of unconstrained videos due to tremendous variations from camera motion,background clutter,object appearance and so on. In this paper,we propose two novel Multi-Feature Hierarchical Latent Dirichlet Allocation models for human behavior recognition by extending the bag-of-word topic models such as the Latent Dirichlet Allocation model and the Multi-Modal Latent Dirichlet Allocation model. The two proposed models with three hierarchies including low-level visual features,feature topics,and behavior topics can effectively fuse two different types of features including motion and static visual features,avoid detecting or tracking the motion objects,and improve the recognition performance even if the features are extracted with a great amount of noise. Finally,we adopt the variational EM algorithm to learn the parameters of these models. Experiments on the YouTube dataset demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed models.     

基于Zynq的虹膜识别系统设计与实现

针对虹膜识别系统存在成本高、操作难度大等不足,给出一种基于Zynq的虹膜识别系统设计方法,进一步拓展虹膜识别系统在民用市场中的运用面。具体讲,就是将虹膜图像存储在SD卡内,通过linux的ramfs(am file system)将SD卡中的虹膜图像加载到RAM,使用VDMA将虹膜数据从RAM搬运至虹膜降噪IP核进行算法加速,完成矩阵卷积的硬件加速,加速完成的数据通过VDMA,搬运回至RAM,供虹膜处理的下一个阶段使用。实验结是证明了所提方法的有效性。     

Unordered rule discovery using Ant Colony Optimization

In this article,a novel unordered classification rule list discovery algorithm is presented based on Ant Colony Optimization（ACO）. The proposed classifier is compared empirically with two other ACO-based classification techniques on 26 data sets,selected from miscellaneous domains,based on several performance measures. As opposed to its ancestors,our technique has the flexibility of generating a list of IF-THEN rules with unrestricted order. It makes the generated classification model more comprehensible and easily interpretable.The results indicate that the performance of the proposed method is statistically significantly better as compared with previous versions of AntMiner based on predictive accuracy and comprehensibility of the classification model.     

基于D-LDA与最近特征分类法的眼虹膜识别系统

以3个主要处理阶段来实现一个高识别率的虹膜识别系统。撷取人眼图像进而分离出虹膜图像,再利用图像处理予以改善,使得虹膜图像更适于后续的识别。接着建立虹膜的特征向量,在虹膜图像展开的过程中,解决了虹膜图像旋转不变性的问题,然后利用直接线性判别分析（D-LDA）的方式进行特征抽取,使得所产生出来的特征向量拥有最大类别间距离与最小类别内距离的特性。最后,探讨多种最近特征分类法与其识别效果,并将上述方法设计完成一套眼虹膜识别系统。实验结果显示,在样本特征向量数较少的情况下识别率有96．47％,如果在每个类别中增加样本特征向量的数量,则系统的识别率可以达到98．50％。     

Toward Accurate and Fast Iris Segmentation for Iris Biometrics

Iris segmentation is an essential module in iris recognition because it defines the effective image region used for subsequent processing such as feature extraction. Traditional iris segmentation methods often involve an exhaustive search of a large parameter space, which is time consuming and sensitive to noise. To address these problems, this paper presents a novel algorithm for accurate and fast iris segmentation. After efficient reflection removal, an Adaboost-cascade iris detector is first built to extract a rough position of the iris center. Edge points of iris boundaries are then detected, and an elastic model named pulling and pushing is established. Under this model, the center and radius of the circular iris boundaries are iteratively refined in a way driven by the restoring forces of Hooke's law. Furthermore, a smoothing spline-based edge fitting scheme is presented to deal with noncircular iris boundaries. After that, eyelids are localized via edge detection followed by curve fitting. The novelty here is the adoption of a rank filter for noise elimination and a histogram filter for tackling the shape irregularity of eyelids. Finally, eyelashes and shadows are detected via a learned prediction model. This model provides an adaptive threshold for eyelash and shadow detection by analyzing the intensity distributions of different iris regions. Experimental results on three challenging iris image databases demonstrate that the proposed algorithm outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and speed.     

轮廓初始点检测对眼睛虹膜区域反射光的去除

针对传统人眼反射光模型单一的缺陷,提出了一种自适应的对不规则形状人眼反射光的检测并去除算法。对含有人眼反射光区域,应用区域生长算法对人眼图像进行分割,并利用垂直边缘检测算子提取虹膜左右轮廓边界,拟合虹膜轮廓,对虹膜所在轮廓区域,采用提出的反射光轮廓初始点检测算法,反射光区域判定算法,对其轮廓的位置进行自动定位并提取,利用虹膜及瞳孔的纹理信息对人眼反射光覆盖区域进行修补。通过对不同人眼图像进行验证,结果表明该方法对检测不同噪声条件下的虹膜反射光具有鲁棒性,并且能够更加快速有效地对虹膜反射光进行去除。     

EyeCerts

In this paper, we propose EyeCerts, a biometric system for the identification of people which achieves offline verification of certified, cryptographically secure documents. An EyeCert is a printed document which certifies the association of content on the document with a biometric feature-a compressed version of a human iris in this work. The system is highly cost-effective since it does not require high complexity, hard-to-replicate printing technologies. Further, the device used to verify an EyeCert is inexpensive, estimated to have approximately the same cost as an off-the-shelf iris-scanning camera. As a central component of the EyeCert system, we present an iris analysis technique that aims to extract and compress the unique features of a given iris with a discrimination criterion using limited storage. The compressed features should be at maximal distance with respect to a reference iris image database. The iris analysis algorithm performs several steps in three main phases: 1) the algorithm detects the human iris by using a new model which is able to compensate for the noise introduced by the surrounding eyelashes and eyelids, 2) it converts the isolated iris using a modified Fourier-Mellin transform into a standard domain where the common radial patterns of the human iris are concisely represented, and 3) it optimally selects, aligns, and near-optimally compresses the most distinctive transform coefficients for each individual user. Using a low-quality imaging system (sub-U.S.$100), a /spl chi//sup 2/ error distribution model, and assuming a fixed false negatives rate of 5%, EyeCert caused false positives at rates better than 10/sup -5/ and as low as 10/sup -30/ for certain users.     

Developing Iris Recognition System for Smartphone Security

Smartphones have become an important way to store sensitive information; therefore, users’ privacy needs to be highly protected. This can be done by using the most reliable and accurate biometric identification system available today: iris recognition. This paper develops and tests an iris recognition system for smartphones. The system uses eye images that rely on visible wavelength; these images are acquired by the smartphone built-in camera. The development of the system passes through four main phases: the first phase is the iris segmentation phase, which is done in three steps to detect the iris region from the captured image, which contains the eye and part of the face using Haar Cascade Classifier training, pupil localization, and iris localization using a Circular Hough Transform. In the second phase, the system applies normalization using a Rubber Sheet model, which converts the iris image to a fixed size pattern. In the third phase, unique features are extracted from that pattern using a Deep Sparse Filtering algorithm. Finally, in the matching phase, seven different matching techniques are investigated to decide the most appropriate one the system will use to verify the user. Two types of testing are conducted: Offline and Online tests. The BIPLab database and a collected dataset are used to measure the accuracy of the system phases and to calculate the Equal Error Rate (EER) for the whole system. The average EER is 0.18 for the BIPLab database and 0.26 for the collected dataset.     

基于纹理方向能量特征的虹膜识别算法

为了解决传统虹膜识别系统在非理想虹膜图像下识别性能不够好的问题,提出了基于纹理方向能量特征的虹膜识别方法。该方法先设计一组水平与垂直的方向滤波器提取虹膜的纹理边缘,比较虹膜纹理边缘在两个方向的能量强度,生成方向能量差异特征图。将特征图分块,选取每块能量差值的极值点作为有效特征点,编码生成特征向量。此外,膨胀噪声模板,消除噪声以及卷积运算中噪声点对周围有效特征点的影响。用汉明距离进行匹配。在采用中科院提供的CASIA3.0虹膜库测试中获得了较好的识别率。     

使用人眼几何特征的视线追踪方法

目的 视线追踪是人机交互的辅助系统,针对传统的虹膜定位方法误判率高且耗时较长的问题,本文提出了一种基于人眼几何特征的视线追踪方法,以提高在2维环境下视线追踪的准确率。方法 首先通过人脸定位算法定位人脸位置,使用人脸特征点检测的特征点定位眼角点位置,通过眼角点计算出人眼的位置。直接使用虹膜中心定位算法的耗时较长,为了使虹膜中心定位的速度加快,先利用虹膜图片建立虹膜模板,然后利用虹膜模板检测出虹膜区域的位置,通过虹膜中心精定位算法定位虹膜中心的位置,最后提取出眼角点、虹膜中心点等信息,对点中包含的角度信息、距离信息进行提取,组合成眼动向量特征。使用神经网络模型进行分类,建立注视点映射关系,实现视线的追踪。通过图像的预处理对图像进行增强,之后提取到了相对的虹膜中心。提取到需要的特征点,建立相对稳定的几何特征代表眼动特征。结果 在普通的实验光照环境中,头部姿态固定的情况下,识别率最高达到98.9%,平均识别率达到95.74%。而当头部姿态在限制区域内发生变化时,仍能保持较高的识别率,平均识别率达到了90%以上。通过实验分析发现,在头部变化的限制区域内,本文方法具有良好的鲁棒性。结论 本文提出使用模板匹配与虹膜精定位相结合的方法来快速定位虹膜中心,利用神经网络来对视线落点进行映射,计算视线落点区域,实验证明本文方法具有较高的精度。